Quotes About Adaptation

We are imitating Nature, who is variable; and he who imitates her cannot be blamed.

When the only tool that you have is a hydrospanner, every problem looks like something that needs to be torqued.

You have your traditions, and are welcome to them. They have shaped the world I've inherited but, by all that is holy, they will not determine the world I pass on to the next generation. And insuring the future is yet one more reason to fight, and one I gladly embrace.

The Arabs always seem to accept yesterday's formulations too late

The works of the past don't have to be right to be great works.

Things aren't always

I ate her cooking for eighteen years, he whispered. You get used to it. Oh yeah, when? I think it happened around the seventeenth year, Henry said.

A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.

Even the most casual study of the record...would show that strange times to be a Jew have almost always been, as well, strange times to be a chicken.

He was astonished at the course that life could take, at the way things that had seemed once to concern him so much--indeed to revolve around him--could turn out to have nothing to do with him at all.

Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.

I guess I don't fit the new corporate profile." "Which is?" "Competence.

Instead he had become immured, by fear and its majordomo, habit...

Bosch counted twenty-two names and it made him miss the old Los Angeles Times. In 1993 it was big and strong, its editions fat with ads and stories produced by a staff of some of the best and brightest journalists in their field. Now the paper looked like somebody who had been through chemo—thin, unsteady, and knowing the inevitable could only be held off for so long.

back from the counter to

sarcastic. It was a crack at him being old school and set in his ways. The Metro was new

The dark side of the moon was where people lived who had been through what Cindy Carpenter had just been through. Where a few dark hours changed everything about every hour that would come after. The place that only the people who had been through it understood. Life was never the same.

I suspected that Judge Leggoe would go along to get along.

Idealism dies hard with everybody.

shifted one step

Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.

Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.

But complex animals had obtained their adaptive flexibility at some cost--they had traded one dependency for another. It was no longer necessary to change their bodies to adapt, because now their adaptation was behavior, socially determined. That behavior required learning. In a sense, among higher animals adaptive fitness was no longer transmitted to the next generation by DNA at all. It was now carried by teaching.

Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing---it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing.